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1. Field of the Invention
The present invention is related to the field of networking. In particular, the present invention is related to a method and apparatus for communicating with plug and play devices.
2. Description of the Related Art
Device drivers typically scan all the Peripheral Component Interconnect (PCI) slots and buses when searching for a PCI plug and play network adapter in a plug and play operating system. Plug and play is an Intel standard for the design of personal computer expansion boards. Plug and play eliminates the frustration of configuring the system when adding new peripherals, and self configure interrupt requests, direct memory access settings, and memory addresses on startup.
Device drivers often use legacy operating system function calls such as, get adapter, get bus information, etc. in order to detect a PCI plug and play network adapter. Some versions of Microsoft""s operating system do not support legacy operating system function calls for detecting and communicating with plug and play devices. Moreover, future versions too will not support legacy operating system function calls for detecting and communicating with plug and play devices.
Under Microsoft""s operating system, a network device that fails to boot is declared invalid in the Windows registry, and the network adapter interface, i.e., the Network Driver Interface Specification (NDIS) driver for the particular network device does not load. The NDIS driver allows network drivers invoked by application programs to communicate with network devices, e.g. network adapters. However, since the NDIS driver does not load, the network adapters cannot be accessed by the application programs. Moreover, because legacy operating system function calls are not supported by Microsoft""s plug and play operating system, kernel-mode network device drivers are also unable to access the network adapters. This makes diagnosis of problems associated with the network adapters virtually impossible.